A ZigBee-based mobile tracking system through wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks have been deployed widely. Sensor networks involve sensor nodes which are very small in size, low in cost and have a short battery-life. One of the critical wireless sensor network applications is localisation and tracking mobile sensor nodes. ZigBee is a new emerging technology for low rate, low power and low range communication networks, which aims to provide long battery life for network devices. In this paper, we discuss various localisation and tracking techniques and categorise these techniques based on the communication between nodes in centralised and decentralised localisation systems. We propose a decentralised ZigBee-based tracking system to detect and track the location of mobile nodes indoors based on the received signal strength (RSS). The proposed tracking system is a range-free system, which does not require additional hardware, depends on a new weight function, and can be deployed wherever the node density is low. The tracking system is implemented by ZigBee sensor devices, and experiments are done to evaluate the proposed tracking system based on accuracy and communication cost.